Abstract

‘Diaspora’ often rhymes with nostalgia for reasons linked to the very nature of diasporic living, from the original moment of ‘unmooring’ from the homeland, to the process of rerooting of diasporic populations in the host country. The shaping of the collective memory of a diaspora, which marks the specificity of diasporas as opposed to other forms of migrations and their more individual trajectories, takes various forms: the forced erasure of history in formerly colonized countries (Memmi) often leaves an indelible mark which the trauma of loss and the sometimes dramatic contexts of diasporic unmooring reinforce. Memory builds up in a rhizomatic way, randomly weaving together fragments of different contexts, creating a storebank of jarring polarities. The following text seeks to evidence the constitutive iteration of the diasporic psyche from the initial moment of uprooting and displacement which signals the start of diasporic living. It revolves around the forming of a collective memory, passed on and transmitted to younger generations, and which holds the members of the diaspora together. The form of the A to Z imposes strict formal constraints, which the free-floating associations seek to challenge. The following ABC is by no means an exhaustive presentation of diasporic experience as a whole — how could it be — but a personal take on contemporary diasporic writers and artists mainly from the West Indies and South Asia through references and allusions to their works.

2Emotional erasure of a place left behind in haste. A few belongings packed in a bag, a few mismatched items of clothing thrown together in a suitcase and some photos of a past one aches to part with. Sometimes a gramophone playing a few notes from a bygone era of pre-exilic bliss, drifting up to unresponsive ears and cold indifference, a jarring Masala of sounds and tones.

3In the rear view mirror, the last glimpse of a motherland the exile fears he or she will forget while the economic migrant secretly longs to return; the coastline receding towards the horizon, its smells becoming more distant, its inhabitants like specks of dust on a line. A ‘line of flight’, a long list of incipits leaving the Distant shore behind; a Final Passage, a Voyage in the Dark…

4Amnesia as collective amnesia and the need to nurse the dissolving bond with other diasporians once the umbilical cord with the homeland has been severed.

5Structural amnesia, imposed by colonization, its crushing political structures forced upon the people, its language yoked to a reality it fails to fully capture and render, its history annihilating that of the country it was made to take over and whose children’s heads are emptied and then filled with the long lists of the glorious deeds of their Gaulish ancestors.

6And in the end, the long-term amnesia of a country crushed by colonial history : total erasure, a blank slate, a point of no return.

7Bodies deprived of their nourishment, forced to get used to foreign tastes and flavours; bodies craving the food of the nurturing land.

8Culinary memoirs, weaving generations together over the years, a continuum of smells and textures, an exuberant garishness of subtle flavours, passed on from generation to generation, from mothers to daughters, bringing the home alive.

9Mnemonic shrapnels encysting the memory of the diasporian, triggering bouts of melancholia or desperate attempts to recreate a flavour, a texture long lost and frozen in the atemporal bliss of childhood memories. Namesakes and ersatz of Indian cakes translated into the culinary grammar of spices made available on a global scale.

10The body of the group at last as a ghostly presence and performative figure in a post-departure life; a need to connect, to bond, to cling together, through language and habits, through a commonality of experience.

11Starving bodies, the bodies of those who drown, of those who never make it to the Distant Shore and whom the Distant Shore lets down.

12Bodies of oblivion, the drowned, the diseased, the forgotten precarious lives lost in migration, hopelessly scattered and never to return, lives hardly mourned and never remembered, bodies adrift without a gravestone to remember them by. Liquified bodies of grief peopling our oceans to global indifference or intermittent focus, eyed suspiciously.

13B is for ‘bodyscape’, visual landscapes of faces and features, made more familiar over the years, through photos and films, free-floating images making foreignness less foreign. And yet, laid out on the page, overexposed in lights too bright not to blink, the ‘other’ gazes back, equally opaque if not more so, despite repeated exposure, shrouded in multi-layered coats of discursive nonsense — brightness leading to more obscurity.

14Her vocal paintings denouncing missionary positions of power and Western scopophilia, the unlimited peeping at the disempowered, the noxious collusion of cognition and exploitation, climaxing in uninvited intrusions. Peep, an exhibition, a statement, forcing us to embrace and assume the role of peeping toms, up on our toes or bending forward to sneak a peek, as if through a keyhole, at the artefacts shrouded in paper. The West, framed and forced into the picture, forced to go through the looking-glass and stare back at its unhealthy curiosity; ugly monsters of perversion in disguise.

15C sections of emotional pain as the migrant is uprooted from the nurturing land. The unbridgeable gap widening by the hour, the impossible return to a homeland whose receding line of flight progressively goes out of focus, while the migrant continues to follow his/her course away from it, hovering away in mock oblivion and imperfect remembrance, shrouded in misty recollections of Imaginary Homelands.

16Still, the separation is real, the return impossible and the past on its way to being forgotten.

17C is for cut, C is for caesura — the fantasized host country versus the reality, the myth — the promised land of unkept promises, of hopes deceived, a land of loneliness, a cold embrace for a heartless welcome, a sea of blind faces blinding him in return, leaving him staggering, his qualities unnoticed, his life unlived, his story untold.

18Diaspora, dia speirein, a scattering of fragments left to disseminate, yet longing to reunite into an aggregate, a whole, a body of others, resedimenting the past in a foreign land, fossilized fragments seeking refossilization in foreign territory. Historical diasporas which continue to haunt the citizen of the 21st century, the Jews, the Armenians, but arguably other diasporas whose sense of group identity and national filiation has resisted the passing of time and the blow of distance and estrangement, to continue to look back and see this façade of a home they long to return to.

19his portraits a photographic chronicle of the changing face of Britain; new faces, new figures, West Indians sporting their uniforms as nurses or bus drivers, South Asians posing confidently in their Sunday best. Racial others no longer relegated to the margins of popular iconography but coming centre stage, confident, empowered, a pictorial revolution by means of commercial portraiture, leaving behind the feminized figures unmanned by orientalist painters, frozen in an atemporal stasis — horses standing still, movement coming to a halt, a surreal space from which time has been banned.

20A more radical form of diaspora, wrenching one from the beloved bosom of the homeland often for quite some time, possibly forever. The fear of leaving for good and never to return, the need to forget and fight off the urge to remember and grieve. Exile, exiled, hopefully a temporary stage, a station of the cross, the better to return.

21— forced displays of commodified bodies belonging to individuals whose consent has not been sought; Hottentot Venuses — their bodies, coveted in the name of science and cognition, eyed and handled without any precaution, dissected, desecrated, disposed of.

22The eclipse of the body in 20th century art, a strange irony of art history. A body aching to return and bear witness to the horrors it has been through. Bodies of ‘others’, bodies of evidence, evidently absent. Eclipsed by new fads, a swing of the pendulum, a strange coincidence, the black body steps in, exit the white body, exit the body in the great invisibilizing shift to abstract art — Mirzoeff’s blinding truth.

23Boundary lines of shame barely containing floods of people — ribbons of human silhouettes, expanding and shrinking, and then stretching to breaking point, snaking in and out of a pitch black tunnel in the hope of a luminous exit.

24the unredeemable break, a permanent cut — before and after, home and away, and then the polarities are swapped. Hovering back and forth for years, the home becomes foreign and the foreign land is tamed, in check, under control.

25a large-scale disaster of gaping inequities getting worse by the hour, unfair, unfairer, as the rich get richer and the poor poorer. No longer going West, they all have to go South, where the rents are low and the purchasing power high, purchasing power, poor chasing power, deterritorialized puppets entangled in rhizomatic roots, pawns on the global chessboard wiped off the board by the Kings, Queens and Bishops of global capitalism.

30a blurred global landscape of shifting lines firmly cutting across the land. Virtual territories superimposed on existing nations, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes : the new realities of a market-colonized world. Pockets of wealth and pockets of poverty side by side, a distended archipelago where the various units have ceased to interface. Islands drifting apart, a fractal geography of pain, a fractal geography of loss. And everywhere huddled masses lost in the chaos-world, marching on, stomping a march of global dissonance.

31and his polyphonous mapping of a chaos-world; the jarring ensemble chartered in his Poétique de la Relation; visionary statements seen through a Caribbean lens, a rich complexity as entry point into the Tout-Monde, a call for a polyglossic world of thriving heteroglossia, read and told in all the languages of the World.

32A transient shape caught in the rearview mirror. S/he tries not to look back, turns a blind eye on the face of grief, concentrating hard on what looms ahead, a façade of a new home, like a mirage in the desert, hazy and out of reach. A ghostly shape calling us, compelling us to go nearer.

33Icarus’s myth, played out over and over again. Yet s/he marches on, no pain, no gain.

34Home, the prospective façade, the light ahead without which the progress would come to an end, the necessary milestone which makes collective dreams seem possible.

36Mona Hatoum’s installation, featuring a set of metallic kitchen utensils laid out on a table, encased in an open space fenced in by electric wires making sizzling noises; home turned into an open space, up for grabs and unprotective, yet enclosed in its inexistent cosiness, its coldness, its sense of danger and precariousness. Home as cold rather than cosy, sharp rather than soft, a space, not a place, where there is no respite : buzzing sounds keeping you awake, artificial humming where there is no homing in; the open space of exposure, a shocking absence of privacy, bodies exposed, transient, unrooted, unmoored, cordoned off but unable to settle, take root or spread their wings and escape the constricting borderlines of horror. Inspired by an exilic trajectory of the twice displaced, a country not fully bidden farewell to and yet left behind for good, a life rerooted in a safe haven, but an ethical need to expose the ongoing horror of displacement and exile.

39disseminated fragments, autonomous entities, separate units in a world gone global, a world of un/commonwealth, an ugly archipelago of ill-matched fragments, a messy quilt. Jarring atoms of an irredeemable future, drifting apart, ever-apart.

40her Mona seeking a Promised Land. Mona and other typical Americans finding their way through the changing geography of the city, constantly on the move, catchment-hunting, social climbing. Models of integration fitting into the mould of the model minority, melting into the melting pot, a vortex of different ethnicities, all absorbed in their own time into the core of the nation, a morphing core, a changing sense of nationhood.

46doomed to migrancy, ever to migrate — a transitory stage turned into a status — a no man’s land for life, bounced back, kicked out, short-term acceptance with a proviso, roots with no room to reroot, lives hanging by a thread, dangly puppets dropped in the ocean and drowning.

47 Media coverage, intense but intermittent, fleeting, flimsy silhouettes, they frazzle out of focus dissolving into the one word: Migrant.

48 Migrant, an awkward present participle creeping into common language — citizens and fellow human beings, wake up to the horror — the horror the horror!

49the compulsive archiving and displaying without self-examination. The relentless race for more artefacts leaving African villagers aghast and traumatized, Dakar expeditions and their cultural ethnocides.

55an ugly scar for an unhealed wound — a legacy of pain scarring the land, marring the surface, cutting into the flesh of the country — a symbolic dismemberment, two halves of a name cut in two, useless corridors leading up to a wall, rooms without a door to enter or exit the shadow lines of pain; for who does the bell toll? For Midnight’s children awaiting in the womb.

56Partition trains taking their bloodied cargo of sacrificial victims home, a line of impossible flight, a line of shame tearing families apart, and among the victims, women, wives or sisters, mothers or daughters parted by partition.

57Piper’s Still for the Fictions of Science, a subtle visual palimpsest, a side view of a man, a black man, “negroid type”, freely framed; measuring devices, a silent hymn to poor Saartje. And definitions, craniology; a name one can barely make out and whose boundaries are not clear, the bare bones of human ignorance parading as science. A line, a hazy line, science and pseudo-sciences, craniology, phrenology, a quantum of nonsense followed by an infinity of pain. Science beware thy destructive hubris.

58— a Kittitian-originated journey for a transatlantic œuvre, an inveterate diasporian relentlessly mapping the complex cartography of his Atlantic Home, penning plots about forced displacement, charting invisible trajectories of pain — the uncharted lives of the great invisible — spectral presences of Lost Children lost in migration. Phillipsian trajectories of pain leaving emotional footprints, haunting voices caught in an echo chamber of textual entanglements cazually weaving their way into criss-crossing yarns while his reader learns to tune in to the Atlantic Sound.

59— the alpha and omega of the diasporic tale, a quest for a better life, seeking more, seeking better, hoping to make it big in the land of failed promises. A quest turned into a request, an unheard one lost on deaf ears.

60— I Like Olympia in Black face; not a negro teamster nor a corked figure made to entertain the white spectator, but a vocal response to Manet’s Olympia and its black figure fading into the dark background. The black female coming centre stage, a daring nude venturing into taboo territory; a respectful take for a crafty artwork cunningly playing with the codes of 3D artwork, the curvaceous body lying flat, the erotic power neutralized, and all that there is left are shades of blackness, shades of whiteness, a healthy hybrid, not a decadent monster of our fearful imaginations. Ironic inversions.

62Impossible: How to go back and admit defeat¸ intense weariness, the pain of unbelonging, the agony of repeated pretense. Return? Impossible, for it would mean admitting to flaws at the heart of the promised land, a fake myth, its streets not paved with gold. Return? Impossible, home is no longer home, they have moved on while part of him has stayed the same, a fossilized fragment seeking refossilization.

63In the House of My Father (1997) a disturbing sculpture made with the artist’s own flesh, a strange exhibit, tiny, delicate, disturbing, held in the palm or his hand, the skin, strangely translucent, black yet not really black. A question of light, a question of exposure, blackness relativized. An ode to the body, a work exposing art’s tentative attempt to transcend death. An unreasonable promise unkept.

64Stepping out of the boat on a frigid morning, finding one’s way out of the train station on a foggy day — Shocking truth behind the myth: no promised land in sight but dingy streets and bleak façades, streets to the left, streets to the right, streets and alleys, none of them paved with gold. Hopping on a double-decker with a vague goal in mind, heading for the job centre.

65Tales of the two Cities, the real and the imaginary, the promised land flanked by its pathetic dopplegänger.

66— Sam Selvon’s insightful chronicle of the impossible move: Moses Ascending, Moses Migrating. Moses unsettled, seeking a land of milk and honey, seeking solace back in a homeland that’s no longer a home.

67Sea crossings made by the first explorers as a prerequisite for later expansion, appropriation, colonization. Sea crossings, slaves huddled in overcrowded slave ships, travelling in the dark, malnourished, cold and sick, sometimes ill, dying, dead, thrown overboard, and forgotten until the big awakening, too late, too mute, too focused and not performative enough to avoid the new deaths at sea.

68silenced testimonies and untold stories, silence of the polyglot whose voice is trapped in the sonorities of a linguistic straitjacket, uttering sounds thought of as gibberish, seeking the right shade of meaning, speaking the same language in a foreign tongue, struggling to translate jokes or simply to express himself, his voice lost in translation. His untranslated self has stayed home while an ersatz has made the journey.

69slaves thrown overboard to secure insurance money, dying an unnatural death, a bloodied cargo, an unethical gamble, slaves drowning and sinking to the bottom of the sea while the ship moves on, making hasty progress towards its fatal end¸ sky clouding into dark layers of ominous clouds announcing judgment day. The two lives of the painting, a mild welcome on British soil, a sea of criticism in the land of freedom, a feast of bad faith as all eyes are focused on the floating manacles awkwardly defying gravity. Lives vanishing without so much as a place of Memory to remember them by, greedy fish ready to eat the remains. A good dose of poetic license forcing us face to face with a conveniently invisible outcome had gravity done its job. The manacles would have conveniently drowned and the corpses would have been invisible instead of floating up to remembrance. And they went on to be remembered, by poets, from Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Zhong! to David Dabydeen’s sequel to Turner’s painting.

82as in Mona Hatoum’s compelling artwork featuring a wheelchair whose handles are two blades; a strange mix of adverse emotions, sympathy empathy and fear. An empty chair as an ode to an absent body, dead, dying, or gone never to return, a symbol of frailty turned into a weapon, a strange interplay of adverse emotions. A fine line, a cutting line, bringing the viewer’s face to face with the reality of traumatic diasporas, the unchosen move to save one’s life.

83Hatoum’s installation at the Béguinage Ste Elizabeth, Kortrijk; a large room, abandoned, deserted but not empty; balls of hair scattered on the floor, an ode to a long gone community of weavers, a remote presence, an invisible pootprint leading to a forgotten past — a short sense of intimacy.

84His provocative rewriting of American history in the form of museum installations, or rather in the form of insidious juxtapositions in official collections. Refined crockery marred by manacles, a strange coming together of brutality and refinement, a metaphor for history, American slavery, a success story of capitalized wealth based on triangular oppression.

88— floating grave of the 132 slaves thrown overboard by slavers. Rescuing cargo money from probable death by epidemics, pushing them overboard to certain insurance-covered hazard — DEATH — death at sea, death by drowning. Lives that do not count, lives that no one cares about, lives freely disposed of, haunting us, from Turners’ slaves ship to literary tributes, a polyphony of humane voices responding to the cold orders uttered by heartless slavers.

A propos des auteurs

Françoise Král

Françoise Král is Professor of English and Postcolonial studies at the University of Caen Normandie (France). Her publications include two monographs in the field of diasporic studies, Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature (Palgrave, 2009) and Social Invisibility in Anglophone Diasporic Literature and Culture: The Fractal Gaze (Palgrave, 2014). She has co-edited two books Re-presenting Otherness: Mapping the Colonial ‘Self’ /Mapping the Indigenous ‘Other’ in the Literatures of Australia and New Zealand (editor, 2004) and Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa and Gins (co-edited with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Rodopi, 2011) and guest-edited an issue of Commonwealth, Essays and Studies, Crossings (37.1 autumn 2014). She had published many articles in the field of postcolonial literature and diasporic studies and is co-organizer of the ‘Diasporic Trajectories’ seminar series (IASH, University of Edinburgh 2015-2016) which focuses on diasporic studies viewed through the dual lens of Anglophone and francophone diasporas. Contact: fmkral@gmail.com